What is a Feed Reader?

A feed reader or feed aggregator is an application that collects and displays items from syndicated feeds that you select. It looks and works a lot like a cross between an email client and a browser, but it displays content syndicated from websites. It will periodically check the feeds that you suscribed to for new items, and when it finds them it will pull the new items down into your feed reader client.

You can find versions of feed reader applications built into websites, desktop applications, mobile apps, email clients, and browser extensions.

Feed Reader Services

This is a short list of some of the most popular feed reader services. Creating an account offers access online, in mobile apps, and as browser extensions — all synced through your account. Which is nice if you subscribe to a feed from your browser, then later want to read the feed on your mobile phone app.

• Feedly
• Feeder
• Inoreader
• Newsblur
• The Old Reader

Desktop Applications

Fluent Reader is free a stand alone desktop feed reader for Mac and Windows.

E-mail Clients

Maybe you like checking your syndicated feeds at the same time as checking your e-mail? While e-mail clients like Apple Mail App and Microsoft Outlook have both dropped support for syndicated feeds, you can still get syndicated feed content in Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s from the same developers that brought you Firefox.

Browsers

Most major browsers have dropped direct support for news feeds, but you can still get your syndicated feed content direct in Opera and Vivaldi.

Browser Extensions

If you’d rather get your syndicated web content while websurfing in your favorite browser, rather than a wholly independent app there are a wide variety of extensions available.

• Feedbro
• Feeder
• Feedly
• Inoreader
• The Old Reader

Search through the marketplace of your favorite browser to find an add-on or extension that you like.

VSCode Extensions

For those who are a little more technically savvy, if you’re using VSCode, you can install an RSS feed reader directly into the IDE.

Search for “RSS” in the Extensions Marketplace tab.

This is only a small sample of feed readers on the market. I purposely excluded readers that didn’t have a free option or looked like they’d be beyond the average hobbyists abilities (FreshRSS). If none of these suit you then just do a little searching and there’s bound to be a feed reader out there that can be used how you want to use it.